


The World Keeps Turning

by Sixthlight



Series: Interstitial Spaces [3]
Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: F/M, Found Family, Gen, Post-Book: Lies Sleeping, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pregnancy, Spoilers for Lies Sleeping, Tumblr Ask Box Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-01-17
Packaged: 2019-10-11 14:26:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17448710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sixthlight/pseuds/Sixthlight
Summary: “I cooked last night! I’m not telling him I gave you food poisoning!”





	The World Keeps Turning

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a combination of prompts I got on Tumblr when I asked for fluffy post-Lies Sleeping prompts. Actual wording in the endnotes.

I had absolutely no intention of making Nightingale the first person we told about the baby. As Bev (and later about half the people I knew, from Jennifer Vaughan to Caroline Linden-Limmer) told me, you didn’t want to tell everybody this early in the piece, because – as much as neither of us wanted to think about it – up until three months, there was still a pretty high chance of something going wrong. Of course, once we told my mum, the entire expatriate population of Sierra Leone was going to know about it. If we told Bev’s family right now and not my family, my mum was probably still going to hear about it. She’d taken to having tea with Bev’s mum. Then there would be _consequences_. So we had a schedule, and until then nobody was going to know – to be fair, I wouldn’t even have known if Bev hadn’t told me.

Of course, then Nightingale came around the next week for a magic lesson and some light Iliad excerpts, and as had become his practice during my suspension, he’d brought an offering from Molly. I wasn’t sure if it was sympathy from Molly for my dire situation, sensible propitiation of the goddess of the household, or just Nightingale using any excuse to get a larger than normal share of cake, now he had to compete for Molly’s output with more than just me, Abigail, Toby, and sometimes Sahra. Either way I wasn’t going to complain.

The Great British Bake Off was back on and, as I knew from Twitter, Molly was industriously baking along with all the challenges. This week had been frangipane tarts. As if by magic, although also definitely not by magic, Beverley appeared the moment Nightingale presented this week’s offering.

“Oooh, what is it this time?” she said, shamelessly opening the tin. Nightingale usually liked to try and save whatever Molly had sent as an incentive for me actually doing my work, although I suspected it mostly enticed him to cut the lessons shorter than they otherwise would have been. Beverley always got her share before we did. I wasn’t sure this was fair but I knew better than to argue.

Beverley leaned over to take a good sniff of the tart, and then promptly jerked back, went a funny colour, and dashed upstairs. Nightingale blinked after her.

“Is she alright?” Nightingale asked me, sniffing the tart himself. “Molly didn’t say what it was, but even her experiments usually don’t get that reaction…”

“We shall not speak of the hollandaise sauce incident of 2012,” I intoned, and sniffed it myself, just to double-check. Something fruity, a bit of almond, that was it. There were very faint sounds of retching from upstairs; evidently Bev hadn’t bothered to close the toilet door. “Nah, it’s fine, Bev’s just - don’t worry about it.”

Nightingale was still looking worried about it, so I added “She’s been this way every morning this week, it’ll pass. Go put this in the kitchen and I’ll go check if she wants a glass of water or anything, then we can get on with it.”

“Every mo-“ he said, and then stopped, and then I stopped, and thought _well, fuck me_. Nightingale looked at me, and then at the stairs, and then back at me with a face that said: I know I shouldn’t ask, but by crikey I want to.

I coughed. “So. Uh. I know we’ve covered apprenticeships and work-life balance, but what’s the policy on apprenticeships and paternity leave?”

“Oh,” Nightingale said, and then, to my complete surprise, used his free hand to clap me enthusiastically on the shoulder, while he broke out into a beaming smile. “Well then. Congratulations!”

I hadn’t only not expected that, I’d been half-bracing myself for bafflement or disapproval or, God only knew, a polite inquiry about when the wedding was going to be (not yet under formal discussion; not until the baby was old enough to be babysat, that was for sure). That’s probably why I just stood there and let Nightingale draw me into a very manly half-hug as he said “This really is the most excellent news I’ve heard for some time” in my ear.

“What happened to ‘we just won’t tell anybody for a couple of weeks then’?” Beverley said, coming down the stairs. She sounded a bit hoarse but not too upset with me, all things considered. I turned to look at her; you wouldn’t know she’d been tossing her guts up a minute ago.  

“He was worried about your well-being, what was I going to say?”

“Food poisoning.” Beverley swept past me to take custody of the offending tart, waving off my concern. “I’ll give it half an hour before I try any. You two might as well get on with the magic or whatever.”

“I cooked last night! I’m not telling him I gave you food poisoning! Then I’d get it from Mum, and then where would we be?”

“Congratulations,” Nightingale was saying again to Beverley, and there was more hugging and even kissing of cheeks. If this un-English display of emotion went on for much longer I was going to have to check him for possession by evil spirits, and I told him so.

Beverley didn’t think much of that. “Don’t be ridiculous, I’d know if he was possessed.”

“I’m very happy for both of you,” Nightingale said, more quietly, and I shut up because I do know when I’m ruining a moment.

“Does that mean the Greek vocabulary is cancelled for today?” I said instead. “In honour of our impending parenthood?”

“No,” said Nightingale, quellingly, but after the ‘magic or whatever’, thank you Bev, he only made me translate about three sentences before we got to tea and frangipane tart, so he didn’t really mean it.

“Tell Molly something with ginger in it next time,” Beverley told Nightingale as he left. “You can tell her why if she asks. But she’s not to tell anybody else.”

“I’ll wait until the official announcement,” Nightingale promised. He looked at both of us, shaking his head, but he was still smiling. He hadn’t really stopped. “What an interesting year this is turning out to be.”

“What happened to ‘we just won’t tell anybody for a couple of weeks then’?” I asked Bev as we watched the Jag pull out of the drive.

“Molly knows how to keep a secret,” she said, putting her arm around my waist. “And so does he.”

“Fuck me, Bev,” I said. “We’re going to be parents.”

“God, I know, it’s terrifying,” she said happily.

*

Bev was right about Nightingale’s trustworthiness, and Molly’s, although Molly did tell Foxglove. I know because she emailed me a sketch of me and Bev holding a baby hidden in swathes of fabric, with several party-popper emojis in place of actual text. (Molly had made me make Nightingale get Foxglove a tablet, and she’d taken to digital art like a waterfowl to a lacustrine environment.)

But if Nightingale did tell anybody who we wanted to tell in person, they all did a really good impression of surprise when we started telling people properly. You can go crazy trying to figure out what people know and don’t, so I try to save that sort of thing for when I’m on the job.

Personally, I think he kept his mouth shut. He’s good like that.

*

My suspension was officially lifted when Bev was part-way through the second trimester; the course of our lives had been divided, over the last couple of months, into weeks and trimesters and blood tests and ultrasound appointments, and it was terrifying and exhilarating all at once. Fortunately the morning sickness (which is not confined to mornings, no matter what anybody tells you) cleared up around sixteen weeks. We were both getting tired of it, though as Bev liked to remind me I wasn’t nearly as tired of it as she was.

I came back to work determined to show that I had my mind in the game and not on my impending fatherhood, but this determination was pretty seriously challenged on a number of fronts. Miriam and Pamela were really close to having their adoption application approved, so Stephanopoulos was happy to talk kids if she had reason to drop by the Folly. The ongoing search for Lesley was reason – although it had been made quite clear to me that I was off that case. I tried not to think about it. I knew it couldn’t last. Nightingale was of course too polite to press me for details but he always made sure to inquire how Beverley was doing, and let me blather on about nursery renovations over lunch even when Sahra pointedly tried to change the subject.

While I’d been exiled – as Beverley insisted on calling it, because of that stupid prophecy – my mum had apparently taken up visiting the Folly to swap recipes with Molly and, I don’t know, make sure the place wasn’t falling down without me. I pointed out that it was actually my workplace and I wasn’t sure that was appropriate, and she told me with great dignity that I had visited a lot of her workplaces over the years, and also Thomas had said she was welcome anytime. One Friday afternoon I found the pair of them wandering around happily discussing which parts of the Folly could be made child-proof.

“The matter hasn’t really come up before,” Nightingale was saying, “but we’re having to make all sorts of other adjustments to the place, so it seems appropriate.”

“Does that mean we’re going to get on with the accessibility stuff?” I said, but was ignored. You’d think someone who’d spent two months in a wheelchair within the last five years would be more reasonable about the Folly’s complete failure to comply with the disability provisions of the Equality Act 2010 and the immediate need to fix it – and install some additional showers while we were at it, not to mention dealing with the delicate and temperamental 1930s wiring – but somehow none of my excellent arguments had ever got through. Apparently Nightingale was more worried about the safety of my future offspring than mine, if I ever broke a leg, which I’d nearly done at least half-a-dozen times since joining the Folly. I was almost offended.

“Child-proof locks are very important,” my mother said. “When Peter was two -”

I kidnapped her before she could keep going on the grounds that she was my mother and I hadn’t seen her for an entire week and a half and we really needed to catch up, but I suspected that if I wanted to stop embarrassing childhood stories being told, I was way, way too late.

“You can tell me next time,” Nightingale said as I pulled her away, confirming all my suspicions.

“I’m going to delete her contact details off your phone,” I warned him before I left that evening.

“I still keep an address book, you know,” he said, in an unreasonably smug fashion. “You’re always talking about the importance of backing up vital data.”

I knew what I wanted to ask but I didn’t really know how to ask it, so I settled for coming at the question sideways.

“Did you ever think about it? Having kids?”

“Oh, God, no,” he said, immediately. “Four brothers and two sisters; I had nieces and nephews before I was out of short trousers, and they all but one had children eventually. Of course we did things rather differently then. But if you’re wondering if I know what small children actually are like…”

“Exhausting,” I said. “But a lot less exhausting when you can hand them back to someone else.”

“So I have always presumed.”

“Does that mean you’re offering to babysit?”

Nightingale didn’t dignify that with a response, which I was counting as a positive. I was trying to pre-emptively establish a rota and I figured Bev and I could use a very deep reserve bench. I offered this metaphor to Nightingale, and he made a sort of snorting noise that might be a laugh, but did his best to look quelling.

That was definitely a yes, then.

*

I told Bev this when I got home.

“I think you’re pushing your luck,” she said.

“If he’s going to have conversations with my mother about child-proofing the Folly, I think we should benefit,” I said. “Honestly I’m not sure why he’s so pleased about it.”

“Have you considered that he’s just happy for you?” Bev suggested.

She was ensconced on the couch and had so far this evening sent me for a cup of tea and then back again for a biscuit, even though she was having to get up every twenty minutes anyway to use the toilet. I thought the baby was still way too small for that to be a problem, but she’d informed me very grumpily that it was hormonal. That didn’t seem fair, but then most things about pregnancy apparently weren’t. I was sitting on the floor in front of the couch, propped up by her spare pillows. They’d started to follow her around the house, like rectangular ducklings.

“I dunno,” I said. “Our relationship doesn’t work along those lines usually.”

“Oh my god,” Bev said. “You’re hopeless.” She bit her lip. “You know, when you were – when you were gone he said –”

“You probably shouldn’t tell me,” I said over the top of her, not because I thought she shouldn’t, but because I didn’t really want to think about what it must have been like for Bev, those eight days nobody knew where I was. The last time I’d been in Fairyland she’d come for me with a steam train. One of the things I’d talked to Valerie about was that part of me – a stupid, irrational part – was mad that she hadn’t, when I hadn’t even been in Fairyland, just Brixton. And that Nightingale hadn’t shown up to bring any brickwork down. That I’d had to get myself out of that particular hole.

The most unfair thing about trauma, Valerie had said to me, was how it fucked up your brain about other parts of your life that had nothing to do with it, and then you had to sit down and do all the hard work of un-fucking them. Well, she hadn’t said ‘fuck’ quite that much. But the sentiment remained.

“Peter?” Bev was saying.

“Well, you shouldn’t,” I said, and then I realised she’d already agreed with me and I hadn’t been listening, or – sort of.

“Yeah,” she said, and squeezed my shoulder. I leaned back into the couch.

“It’s just,” I said, because even our original topic was better, “I thought he’d think, I dunno, maybe that I was slacking off, or that you and me weren’t ready, or maybe he agreed with Ty about the long-term view, or probably he’d just sort of vaguely approve. I didn’t think he’d be happy about it. He’s always on about me keeping my mind on the job.” Although not with so much war-footing vehemence since Covent Garden Round Two, to be fair.

“He asked me to go and help you in Herefordshire,” said Bev. “I’m pretty sure he knew what was going to happen once I got you in the same place for a couple of weeks. I know I did.”

“I wasn’t that useless.”

“You were, about that specific thing.” She grinned. “You have your uses otherwise.”

“I still don’t reckon he thought it’d lead to us sprogging.”

“If anybody knows that the future isn’t predictable, I’m pretty sure he does.” Bev shifted. “Ugh, move, I have to get up again.”

When she came back, I said “You know, I had a thought.”

“Mmmm?” Bev was getting herself into position again, which seemed to take a lot of concentration. I told her what my thought was.

“Huh,” she said, and pursed her lips.

“Never mind.”

“No, I didn’t mean…yeah, alright.”

“Yeah?”

“It feels right,” Beverley said. “Mythically.”

“I don’t think our kid’s going to be very mythic,” I said, thinking of Olivia Thames-McAllister’s bedroom, and her mum talking about knowing she’d watch her babies die. “I mean, fantastic, obviously. But not mythic. I’m pretty sure it’s going to take after me in that regard.”

“Maybe you’re underselling yourself,” Beverley said, and tugged at my upper arm. “Come up here – there’s room.” She even evicted a pillow to make space for me.

It only lasted for about twenty minutes before she had to use the loo _again_ , but you learn to take what you can get.

*

I subtly brought the baby up in conversation with Nightingale by showing him Bev’s latest ultrasound at the end of our Monday morning meeting, the small one we had before the all-hands meeting at nine. Normally Sahra came but Stephanopoulos had been presented with a particularly gnarly though non-magical double homicide over the weekend, and had borrowed her back, seeing as we didn’t have anything urgent happening right now.

“I assume this shows that everything’s going as it should be,” Nightingale said, scrutinizing the image.

“Yeah, so do I,” I said. “At least that’s what the technician said. I tried to get a second opinion from Jennifer but she said she did deaths, not births.” I put it away. “So, uh, Bev and I were talking.”

“About your paternity leave?” said Nightingale.

“I thought that was sorted?”

“It is – I wondered if you’d decided you wanted to extend it.”

“No,” I said. “No, what we were talking about is, we were wondering if…if you’d like to be the godfather? Since you seem really, I dunno, keen on the whole idea?”

This seemed to really take Nightingale aback, so I followed up quickly, “Or, you can say no, it’s not a big deal, it’s not like we’re religious – I mean I’m not – I’m not sure how it works for Bev -”

“Yes, of course,” Nightingale said, once I paused for breath. “If you’re serious. It would be an honour.”

“Right, great, I’ll tell her,” I said, and then we both stared at the table for a few seconds so we could pretend no emotions were involved in this decision. I could see out of the corner of my eye that Nightingale was smiling, though.

“Although, who knows,” I said after a second, “you might be much less excited about it once the baby’s actually here.”

“I think we established that I have, in fact, interacted with children before.” Nightingale refilled his coffee, and rattled the pot; hopefully Molly brought us another one before everybody else showed up. “And I don’t think so.” He regarded me thoughtfully, though the corner of his mouth was still turned up. “All of this feels very much like…moving forward. Things were frozen here, for so long, before you decided to take a chance on wizardry. And then Chorley came along, and everything that followed, and we had no time for anything else – or so it felt. You and Beverley having a child, it’s a reminder that we don’t just have to keep fixing past mistakes.”

“No, we’re going to get the chance to make lots of exciting new ones,” I said. “That’s parenthood in a nutshell.” I grinned. “I can’t wait.”

The door opened; it was Molly, with a fresh pot of coffee, and some of the rest of the team behind her. Back to business.

Nightingale caught my eye, before we started saying good morning to everybody else. “You know? Neither can I.”

**Author's Note:**

> joylee56 said: Peter breaking the news to Nightingale (and maybe Molly?) about the sprog. Or anybody else for that matter.
> 
> Anon: nightingale being really REALLY excited about the future grant-thames addition? bonus if he, rose, and maybe mama thames end up bonding over it?
> 
> scesisonomaton: Peter asking Nightingale to be godfather, pretty please with a cherry on top?


End file.
